St Mary, Ashby
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk
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St Mary, Ashby |
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www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk |
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Follow these journeys as they happen at Last Of England Twitter.
| Here we are in the deanery of
Lothingland which drives a wedge up between Norfolk and
the sea, and since the 1974 boundary changes Ashby has
been Suffolk's most northerly parish. Perhaps the Old
Norse -by suggests how far north we have come,
and indeed we are not so very far from the Norfolk Fleggs
where that placename ending abounds. Ashby is a scattered
parish without a village, and its church lies out in the
fields at the end of a half mile track from the nearest
road, on the edge of the Somerleyton estate. At the time
of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship there were fifty
people living in the parish, and Samuel Brame, who styled
himself registrar but was likely the parish
clerk, claimed an average attendance on a Sunday morning
of twenty. There are reasons for thinking it was fewer
than that, given the local enthusiasm for non-conformity
and the proximity of Samuel Morton Peto's grand new
Baptist chapel at Somerleyton Hall across the fields. This is one of several round-towered churches in Lothingland, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Only the lower third of the tower is round, the rest of it octagonal, and you might think this is a later addition to an older structure. In fact, it seems that the whole church, tower, nave and chancel, was entirely rebuilt in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries. As Pevsner points out, both the round and the octagonal parts of the tower have medieval brick in them. The nave and chancel run together under a continuous thatched roof. There were several late 19th Century restorations which replaced the east window, the roofs and all the furnishings, and so perhaps there is little of interest inside, although I understand that a 12th Century square font survives which presumably was in the earlier church on this site. When I first came here in the 1990s there was a keyholder a couple of miles off, but that no longer seems to be the case. The rector here at the time of the Census of Religious Worship was Edward Thurlow, who was also rector of nearby Lound, where he lived, and of the tiny parish of Langham across the county near Stowmarket. This was the kind of plurality that the 19th Century Anglican revival would do away with, for Thurlow's annual income from his three incumbencies was almost a thousand pounds, roughly two hundred thousand pounds a year in today's money. A memorial set on the outside of the south wall remembers in meticulous detail the life and death of Sarah Sherwood, ye wife of John Sherwood who liv'd together 36 years 8 months 2 weeks, she departed this life May ye 19 1730 between 1 and 2 of clock in ye morning in ye 66 year of her age. Sarah's first name has long been eroded away, but fortunately the memorial was transcribed in the late 19th Century. At the church gate is a memorial to seven airmen killed in two separate incidents. Five of them died when a B17 Flying Fortress from the 100th Bomb Group crashed into the nearby marshes in May 1944. The others were killed in a collision between two P47 Thunderbolts from the American 5th Emergency Squadron a year later. The marshes themselves, best seen from nearby Somerleyton railway station, are classic borderlands. You can sense the Norfolk Broads beyond them. |
Simon Knott, September 2022
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